by Everly Frost
Beside us, the wild dog kept pace. And gained.
Escape or we will die, the other me screamed.
I knew the truth of it, but I didn’t know I’d lost the reins until they swung away in an arc and flipped back, striking Cloud’s flanks. He jerked again, his hind legs bunching before his body lifted and plunged. I left my seat and crashed back down, clawing my fingers into his neck, desperate to stay on.
My legs slid on Cloud’s back and then I saw it. Something else racing alongside the dog, flying through the trees and grass, closer and closer.
A shadow with a blade.
I remembered it. It was the same shadow that followed me into the woods on the night my mother died.
The other me saw it, too, and with despair, she drained away from me, shrieking and crying and fading, leaving me to crash.
I lurched to the side and slipped away from my horse, away from safety. Cloud bucked as my fingers closed around his mane, tearing hair as I collided with the ground.
The dog leaped.
I bounced.
Bones broke as teeth ripped into me.
Chapter 4
SOMEONE KNELT BESIDE me in the shadowy place where I kept the pain at bay. He touched my hair and smoothed my forehead, grasping my wrist.
There was a crunch as twigs snapped. I recognized grass and leaves beneath my arms—wet and slippery like my fingers. The backs of my legs burned from being dragged.
His hands stroked my face so lightly I thought of dragonfly wings, the way they beat at their own reflection on the glassy surface of the dam. The way I’d watch them as I perched on a rock at the edge—until the cattle came to drink and the dragonflies zipped toward the middle of the water. I wanted to go there, too.
I wanted to be like Samuel, plunging under the surface. I wanted to be like my mother, shedding my skin and slipping down into an abyss. If I imagined it hard enough, maybe I could sink to the bottom and disappear under the silt. The sticky blood would wash away. The agony of ripping teeth would dissolve like bitter sugar.
I could gulp liquid, instead of fire, and that would be the end of it.
I wanted to be little again, swinging in the dark, the thin vines pressing ever tighter into my windpipe, crushing my neck with my own weight, because if I’d died then, all that time ago, I wouldn’t be here now with my body shredded into pieces.
The man swore—the kind of bad word Timothy used that earned him a wallop over the head from our father. “How are you still alive?”
I struggled to die.
I wondered where she was now—the other me—when I needed her cold heart to cool my burning limbs, to numb me to this pain. Her voice whispered faintly in the back of my mind, no defense against the pain.
Worse, an orange blaze rose above my eyelids, stronger and brighter. I cracked open my eyes, caked and stiff to find that a circular fire burned in the yellow sky.
I stared into the furious sun. Then I found his face near mine—the man with eyes the color of eucalyptus leaves.
I squinted at him and every thought of her disappeared. Her voice was gone. Her thoughts were gone. For a moment, she didn’t exist.
His lips weren’t smiling. They should have been smiling, and maybe even those lips should have been touching my own.
“Caroline?”
He waited.
I blinked, ignoring the stretch of skin around my eyes. My lips moved but no sound came out.
He said something else. I tried to concentrate, but my head hurt and I didn’t want to think. I wanted only to look at those lips and eyes and ignore the sounds around me.
An animal keened nearby, groaning in the grass. I struggled to turn my head to see blades of green and a twitching, white mound. Cloud?
“Caroline. Look at me.” His eyes begged me to listen. “Don’t look around. Just look at me.”
I tried to focus on his face and not on the sound.
“I need to know what’s broken before I move you. Don’t try to speak. When I touch you, shut your eyes if it hurts.”
His gaze stayed on mine, but his fingers probed my arms and legs. He swore a couple more times.
My eyes squeezed shut as he reached my side and the pain increased, but his fingers continued touching all around, seeking the places where I was broken.
Why did he have to be so cruel? This man should never be cruel to me.
As his hands moved, the pain increased, until the welcome pool of darkness beckoned.
Before it closed around me, before I succumbed to the sheer bliss of nothing, there was a sharp crack so loud that it echoed out and back and thrummed through my fading head.
Then, there was weightlessness. Green blurs and streaks of sky. Far, far below, the toes of steel-capped boots entered and left my field of vision. Beyond them our shadows crept—a blur at the edge of my world. I wondered if it was my real shadow or the shadow with the blade that crawled the earth.
“She’s alive.”
The rumble of the man’s voice vibrated against my ear, pulling me upward, away from the scuttling ground. I sensed the breath draw into his chest, interrupted by running footsteps and a fearful shriek.
Rebecca’s face disappeared behind my closing eyelids as other people joined her.
Timothy’s voice was a command. “I’ll take her.”
The man’s arms tightened around me. “No. It was dangerous to move her at all. Her ribs are broken. Where’s the doctor?”
“Dr. Falkner’s at the house. Rebecca, stop crying, run back—tell them we’ve found her. Tell them…” Timothy’s words twisted as late winter air whipped them away across the field. “Tell them it’s bad.”
The faces of my family flashed in and out as the ground moved again. Their voices—sometimes talking, sometimes weeping—seeped through my consciousness.
My vision turned to black and when I resurfaced, I was inside the house. The man’s arms had left me and I was empty without him. The kitchen table was beneath my back and the doctor’s eyes the only ones to meet mine.
My family argued about the train and a plastic surgeon and a hospital in the city.
But Dad’s voice rose above it all and ended it.
“You! You’re supposed to be a doctor. Do the best you can or so help me. Timothy, tell Nathan I want to speak to him right now.”
A door slammed.
Then there was tugging at my skin, over and over, and a sharp sting that sent me into the dark again.
I twisted and tried to move my arms as I floated in shadows.
Through the slits between my eyelids, I made out the table by my bed and the glint of sunlight off the mirror on top of the dresser against the far wall. The window was open and birds called from the branches outside. I lay still for a long time, sensing the breath draw in and out of my lungs. It hurt to breathe, but not as much as before.
I wanted to call out for a drink of water, my mouth was so dry, but when I tried to move, my chest constricted. I opened and closed my fingers for a moment, testing them, before I found the bandages wrapped around me.
One went all the way from under my arms to my waist. Running my fingers across the rest of my body as far as I could without moving anything else, I found bandages covering one of my thighs—but I couldn’t reach low enough to find out how far they went—and more bandages on my arms. There were even patches on my face.
My hands were strange, too. Several of my fingernails were gone, pink mushy skin exposed and sore. A line was attached to the back of my hand, hanging from a clear plastic bag tied to a metal pole at my bedside.
I remembered the curve of the bridge and the freezing evening air, the jolt as Cloud stumbled, and the wild dog gliding across the ground. I remembered the shadow that followed us and the cut of something other than teeth…
Everything blurred.
I stiffened, slid under the covers, and closed my eyes, ignoring my intense thirst. I didn’t want to be awake anymore. I scrunched closed my eyes, but the door cracked open and Rebecc
a slid into the room.
“Caroline?”
I attempted a smile, trying to ease the worry in her eyes.
“Thank heavens, you’re awake.” Her hand flew from her heart to my shoulder as she bent over me, perching on the side of the bed. “How are you, dearest? Are you in pain? Do you need some water?”
I managed to nod—yes, to both—and she reached for the jug and cup at my bedside, handing them to me with a couple of pills.
“Better?” she asked, after I gulped down a whole glass. “Caroline, we were so worried, you have no idea. When you didn’t come back… What happened to you?”
I touched my throat, opened my mouth. I tried to say that I didn’t remember, but my voice grated in my throat like barbed wire.
“Caroline?” She waited, but it didn’t do any good. “You can’t speak, can you?”
She pressed her trembling lips together as her eyes filled with tears. All her questions died in the air and my own joined them.
“Dr. Falkner is coming out again this afternoon to check your wounds. Oh. I should tell everyone you’re awake. Aunt Alice has been beside herself and Timothy’s been sitting in here every other hour—”
My eyebrows rose despite themselves, because my dispassionate older brother wasn’t the type to play nursemaid.
“—and Edith’s been trying to stop Samuel throwing stones at tin cans. He says he’ll find that wild dog and kill it. That’s if the men don’t find it first.”
She started upward but I grabbed her hand and managed a single word: “Who?”
“Who found you? After Timothy rode into town and you weren’t there—and Jack swore black and blue that you weren’t hidden in the stables—everyone came out to look for you. Heaps of people from town. But you were way out in one of the paddocks.” She hesitated. “It was Nathan. The new ranch hand.”
Nathan.
After Rebecca left, I buried my head in my pillow. Despite myself, my eyes prickled with tears. I tried to move my legs but the stitches pulled. I wouldn’t be going anywhere near Cloud after this, not for a long time. It would take forever for my body to heal enough to ride again.
And Nathan… He found me and saved my life.
I closed my eyes and listened for the memory of his voice reverberating in my ear.
Chapter 5
LATER THAT WEEK, Rebecca reappeared around my door. “Honey? Dr. Falkner’s here to check on you.”
I murmured in response and the door opened. The air of calm around the town doctor filled me with relief. I guessed he’d seen enough gore in his life not to descend into hysterics. Rebecca retreated to the chair in the corner of the room as he snapped open his bag.
“Right, young lady. I’m going to check over all your bandages and see how your face is doing today, okay?”
I nodded as he pushed away the bedclothes in a business-like manner and checked over my wounds. “Your ribs are doing well, they’ll heal nicely, but watch your rest, or they’ll set crooked. I’m going to redo the bandage on your leg and these ones on your arms.”
I winced as he pulled the material away and eyed the stitches. Two gashes marred my outer right thigh and a puzzle of red slashes adorned my arms.
The doctor caught me looking at them. He lowered his voice. “Whatever it was, you fought it hard. I’ve seen dog attacks before. Not many people survive something this vicious. For some reason, it didn’t go for your throat.”
My throat. Where the vines had wound around me when I was a little girl and I’d tried so hard to make myself forget.
The dog could have killed me, but maybe death didn’t want me. Maybe only pain wanted me.
I shook my head. I remembered teeth in the moonlight, Cloud thrashing the ground, and both of us falling. Then, the shadow that consumed us both, the shredding of teeth and steel, and Cloud rearing and trying to trample it with his hooves. But nothing can trample a shadow. I closed my eyes, relieved as the images faded.
The doctor turned his attention to my face and the three long wounds that stretched from my hairline to my nose.
“It certainly had a good go at your face.” He pushed his glasses up his nose, chewing his lip. “You know, I’ve seen a lot of dog bites around these parts, but these cuts, they look more like they were made with a…”
From the corner of the room, Rebecca leaned forward, and Dr. Falkner sucked in his breath.
He said, “Well. If you’re lucky, they won’t scar.”
His lips thinned. “Of course, if your father had agreed to send you to the city to a plastic surgeon, there would be no chance of scarring.” He finished examining the stitches and sat back. “Yes, the stitches are doing well. I’m hopeful they won’t leave permanent marks. I’ll come back in a few days to take them out.”
“My voice?” I managed.
“You’ll get your voice back soon enough. In the meantime, you have to rest.”
Rebecca rose from the chair as the doctor tidied his things. She threw me a wan smile as she followed him out and closed the door.
I listened as they walked down the hallway and Rebecca asked, “What about her voice?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to upset you but I suspect she screamed a lot during the attack. The effect is temporary—she needs to rest. Don’t press her for details until she’s ready.”
“She doesn’t seem to remember anything at all. Is that normal? Will her memories come back?”
“She might remember in time, but she may not be prepared to speak about it. The attack was severe. You can’t force her to tell you about it.”
“I see. And her face?”
“I’m quite confident about that…”
They were too far away to hear anymore. I shifted, my eyes seeking the window and the sunlight pouring onto the floor, but not reaching me. I stretched out my arm so that one of my fingers—fleshy without its nail—found the sunbeam. I envied that little limb, doused in golden light.
They wouldn’t let me out of my room until the stiches came out, so I stayed for five more days, staring at the slash of light across the floor until Dr. Falkner returned and gave me a sad smile.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose as he said, “I’m sorry, this will hurt.”
I bit back tears and hated myself for crying as he tugged out the stitches, and I trembled for a long time afterward.
A week after that, Aunt Alice finally let me come downstairs—on condition that Timothy helped me. I leaned on him, despite promising myself I would manage on my own.
“You all right, Caroline?” He studied my cheek—the livid, red welts where my normal, smooth skin used to be.
“I guess so.” I tugged as he guided me into the living room. “Let me go outside.”
He pursed his lips. “Alice said to keep you inside, and Rebecca will give me a thrashing if I even think about it.”
“I know, but I need to see the sun.”
He shook his head and I knew he was torn.
“Please, Timothy,” I said, working on the opening I saw in his expression. “I need fresh air. I’m suffocating in here.”
He looked hard at me. His eyes told me he knew what I meant. I could see him picturing himself in my place. “Okay, but only for a little while.”
He helped me out to the front veranda to one of the wooden benches and awkwardly plumped some pillows for me to rest against. Then he stood close by, watching over me.
“It’s okay, Timothy. I’m okay. You can go back to whatever you were doing.”
He hesitated. “Caroline, there’s something…” He stopped and glanced at me again while his toe scuffed the floorboards. “Okay. I’ll tell Rebecca you’re here so she’ll know to check if you need anything. Even if it gets me a thump in the face.”
He disappeared and I looked out over the front yard and realized that I wasn’t alone, after all.
There was another man making his way up the side of the house. Not Nathan, but someone else new. He looked a few years older than me. He was tallish with dar
k hair and brown eyes and he wore a clean shirt that hid what I suspected were some pretty strong arms. I took in the partly finished fence, the newly plowed garden beds, and the start of a path up to the stairs. My jaw would have dropped except that it hurt too much.
It looked like Alice was getting her garden.
The man gave me a small nod before going back to work. At least he didn’t swoop on me like everyone else.
Rebecca appeared beside me and I barely suppressed a sigh. “You all need to stop worrying so much.”
As she sat beside me, her hands folded and unfolded in her lap, over and over again. She wore new jeans and a pale pink shirt that brought out the rose in her cheeks.
I frowned, scrutinizing her face. A tiny strand of black hair lay against her cheek, seeking freedom from the knot at the back of her head. Aunt Alice hadn’t wasted any time working her magic while I was recovering.
“Caroline, darling, we can’t help it. We almost lost you. And…”
I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. She stared out over the garden, but it didn’t look like she was seeing it. I thought that was a pity, because now the gardener-man had rolled up his sleeves and was pitching fence posts, his strong legs planted on the earth, arm muscles bunching.
He glanced up, his attention on my sister. He nodded in her direction. I watched, incredulous, as Rebecca blushed, her eyes lowered, and that same defiant lock of hair fell across her cheek.
At my questioning look, she said, “His name’s Robert.”
I chewed my lip. Rebecca was twenty-one—one year older than Timothy and two years older than me. Like me, she’d never had a boyfriend because who was there to meet out here? Town was an hour away by car—over two hours if we rode our horses—and we hadn’t gone to the local school, studying by distance education instead.
As far as meeting boys went, our options were as slim as the tallest blade of grass. We didn’t mix with the cattlemen. Dad forbade that and we had the sense to obey him. It hadn’t mattered before.
I said, “So Alice gets her garden.”